When you carry a tiny secret red notebook with you wherever you go- "The neverseas of... (her hair, unexplored time, an old age they would not have, etc)" NAMES: T.T., Etta, Sixto Lake, Bird Summerson, Greeley, Blitchridge, Dulsey. DOG'S NAME: BOOZER Clownwatch. "Hmm. Might get a little sporty now." (Riverguide, calmly.) The loose, brief charm of a dog rose She had a brief, fragile beauty, like one of those girls married too young in colonial times. (wildflower beauty) White as electric snow. A place called Wet Planet, somebody keeps calling it Wet World. Write a story about people who work at a pet store A memorized smile (painful, rehearsed) "I don't eat sweet with savory, myself." ".. you have to eat the voices in your head..." "Its so... primitive, that we need to sleep!" I could smell the lake's sour basements The sour basements of his lungs Woman who cuts her mouth with a diamond ring, spits blood at people. Character: flight stewardess "Why are you doing this?" (to fatale) "I like the attention. Obv." I knew her parents had been married to other people, that their divorces had been more of a spousal swap than anything. Afterwards the four friends continued to live on as before, in the same apartment complex. Anyway, it had given Nura a kind of fixed coolness; she was a dyed in the wool cynic. "Ah, that's where assholes come from- hangovers." "Look, I'm making sure people have jobs, ok?" And if she hadn't closed the door in precisely that same way, would all that summer have been different? Or is each of us- is everything- put together in such a way as to be drawn ceaselessly in one inexorable direction, like leaves and bottle caps sucking towards a storm drain-? Snapped her dreams as easily, thoughtlessly, as a spider's filaments A mosquito prickled my leg He had a venipuncturist's mouth, sharp-toothed & pursed, and a nightmare image of a correspondingly needle-nosed dick sprang up in my mind (during convo/cobra img later) "Did you know there was this ancient tribe that used to, like, smooth their heads so that their eyes bulged out, like this, for better peripheral vision?" "Where do you get your ideas?" "I don't know, man, think I just love dramatic shit." Pleasantly unreal... "Everything is niche now," she said, assuredly. A grinning woman with a golden grill had just sauntered past, and she was thinking to herself about how many kinds of beauty there were, how many kinds of beholders. "You know whats funny about that," he said, still texting, "Its always been. We just didn't realize it- there never was a dominant paradigm, just a bunch of disparate niches, all trying to hide themselves under it. Like kids hiding under a table. Nobody wants to be the one who gets whipped first." "Alex Perez, or the driver of a 2008 Isuzu Rodeo, please return to the cell phone waiting area, where your car has been abandoned, to meet with law enforcement. Or your car will be towed." Bums laughed hysterically. (fragment after painful dialogue) The grubby bacon fat of the soul, sizzling away. It was a humid, petaled dream: she felt it all through her, an opening of her senses, as if she were being stepped through, tasted; a round, warm bee lightly wandering into the fingertip doorway of her flesh. Cat sense Letting go of the story He had a secret fondness for scented soap Blank eye socket Clocking along Supreme grin Sunfishing He was round shouldered, sway backed, as if nurturing a nonexistent potbelly, a comfortable slouch which had begun as innocent kindergarten defiance... now slowly malforming his spine... Raincoat of indifference -Maybe words too reductive- an image driven society, because too complex, evanescent, for words? Written language comparatively new, unnatural anyway- She snailed from the sofa towards the kitchen, still wrapped in and dragging a quilt rain-light, sooty a deep mirror, satisfyingly unknowable- but which knows you as if i were floating in sunstroke skinny, fleshless “It looks so different from here.” “Everything is perspective, honey.” this was their game. |
Pauline WestPauline West's first novel, EVENING’S LAND, is winner of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Award and recipient of the Carol Marie Smith Memorial Scholarship for the NOEPE Center of Literary Arts. Categories
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